Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda...

Situational irony concerns what it is about a situation that causes people to describe it as ironic. Although situational irony is as complex and commonplace as verbal and literary irony, it has received nowhere near the same attention from cognitive scientists and other scholars. This paper presents the bicoherence theory of situational irony, based on the theory of conceptual coherence (Kunda...

Five studies examined the automatic and controlled components of attributional inference in U.S. and East Asian (EA) samples. Studies 1 through 3 used variations of the "anxious woman" paradigm, manipulating the inferential goal (dispositional or situational) and the normative impact of situational constraint information (discounting or augmenting). In each study, U.S. and EA participants under...

Organizations often implement Security Education, Training, and Awareness (SETA) programs to help improve secure behavior. SETA programs can be multifaceted; however, organizations often take a “one-size-fits-all” approach to improve security, without understanding how different SETA components influence behavior. In this research, we explain how two common SETA program components—online traini...

Prolonged sedentary behavior is prevalent among office workers and has been found to be detrimental to health. Preventing and reducing prolonged sedentary behavior require interventions, and persuasive technology is expected to make a contribution in this domain. In this paper, we use the framework of persuasive system design (PSD) principles to investigate the utilization and effectiveness of ...

BACKGROUND To determine the effectiveness of reminders compared to no reminders in improving adherence to multiple clinical recommendations measured as the resolution of the clinical condition that motivated the reminder, in a primary care setting with a well-established feedback system. METHODS/DESIGN A 12-month, cluster-randomized, controlled clinical trial was designed (randomized by prima...

BACKGROUND Successful diabetes disease management involves routine medical care with individualized patient goals, self-management education and on-going support to reduce complications. Without interventions that facilitate patient scheduling, improve attendance to provider appointments and provide patient information to provider and care team, preventive services cannot begin. This review exa...

BACKGROUND Although colorectal cancer screening by using a fecal occult blood test (FOBT), flexible sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy, or barium enema x-ray reduces the incidence of and death from colorectal cancer, the rate of colorectal cancer screening in the general population is low. We conducted a randomized trial consisting of direct mailing of FOBT kits to increase colorectal cancer screening ...

The authors propose that wilderness is intrinsically associated with death, and, consequently, terror management concerns may promote more negative evaluations of wilderness. Consistent with this, wilderness inspired more thoughts about death than either cultivated nature or urban environments (Study 1), and death reminders reduced perceived beauty of wilderness (Study 2). The authors further s...